Review: THE HOLY ROSENBERGS, Menier Chocolate Factory

At the Menier Chocolate Factory, the revival of Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs arrives with the weight of history attached to it. When it first appeared at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Theatre in 2011, it was a sharp entry into a conversation about Jewish identity, family loyalty and modern political fracture. Fifteen years on, the conversation has become rather crowded.

Recent theatre has returned repeatedly to the same well. Works such as Sam Grabiner’s Christmas Day and Patrick Marber’s This Is What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank have examined Jewish identity, generational conflict and the uneasy relationship between diaspora Jews and Israeli politics with considerable force. Against that backdrop, The Holy Rosenbergs finds itself revisiting ground that now feels familiar. Important ground, certainly, but well trodden.

The play attempts to compensate by throwing an impressive quantity of story at the stage. The Rosenberg patriarch David (Nicholas Wodeson) faces the collapse of his catering company following the death of a diner after eating his salmon mousse. To make up for the lost contracts, he spends days erecting Roman pillars outside his house and nights driving a minicab with an axe within easy reach, details that feel as though they have wandered in from a different play entirely. 

Meanwhile his daughter Ruth (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) returns home from Geneva where she has been writing a controversial human rights report examining breaches committed by both Israelis and Gazans based on evidence from (among others) her since-deceased brother Danny. Her presence becomes a problem when she seeks to attend his funeral, only to find both the family’s rabbi and the synagogue chair determined to keep her away.

Hovering over all this are Jonny (Nitai Levi), the surviving son desperate to escape his father’s expectations and the life mapped out for him and David’s wife Lesley (Tracy-Ann Oberman) who is emotionally exhausted as she tries to keep the family from imploding.

Lindsay Posner directs this revival as a cocktail of Friday Night Dinner — in which Wodeson appeared as a rabbi — stirred in with healthy dollops of Eastenders and Newsnight. Tim Shortall’s static set is Nineties by way of the Seventies, a midi hifi system the only sign of technology among the Italian furniture and family photos. The sound and light design from Yvonne Gilbert and Charles Balfour are similarly perfunctory.

Individually, many of these strands have bite. Collectively, they compete. At two hours and fifteen minutes the play has time to explore them, but rarely the discipline to choose which matters most. We ricochet between sitcom style family squabbles, kitchen sink domestic drama and sudden eruptions of political debate. The result is a play deeply concerned with questions of identity that ironically struggles to establish its own.

What keeps the evening from collapsing under the weight of its ambitions is the acting. Even while wading through cliche after cliche Wodeson (who was raised in Israel) cuts a sympathetic figure as the pater (very) familias bouncing from one crisis to another. Adrian Lukis’ late appearance as Ruth’s boss Sir Stephen Crossley brings formidable presence and emotional heft; his titanic debate with Dan Fredenburgh’s Saul is arguably the highlight of the play and anchors any claim that The Holy Rosenbergs is more than the sum of its many dramatic elements. Myer-Bennett is equally compelling, navigating the character’s moral certainty and emotional vulnerability with intelligence and restraint. 

The Holy Rosenbergs remains a sturdy, occasionally engaging examination of family, faith and political conscience. Yet in trying to say everything at once, this revival ends up diluting its strongest ideas. In a play so preoccupied with the question of who we are, the most surprising thing is how hard it is to pin down exactly what this one wants to be.

The Holy Rosenbergs continues at Menier Chocolate Factory until 2 May.